Building a Full Causality Chain Across an Enterprise System ()

Starting Date: June 2018Duration: 8-10weeksTime commitment: 20h/weekPrerequisites: Second Year

Data Provenance refers to records of the inputs, entities, systems and process that influence data of interest, providing a historical record of the data and its origins. To provide a holistic view of the data provenance in an enterprise system, the provenance records of the activities carried out on a client workstation is important.

Last year, we proposed a unique provenance collection and storage scheme which is under patent review right now. The main features of this technique were the causality relationship it creates from the database activities. We want to expand this causality relationship to include events and impact assessment from the database server and client workstation provenance. Therefore, the aim is to build a full causality chain that includes end-to-end events and impact assessment from request initiation to client be served with the data. This project will deploy a Linux OS and Windows running workstations.

The student should have an interest in and willingness to learn basic data provenance, would have prior knowledge of basic MySQL and/or Mongo (No-SQL databases). Ideally, would be familiar with C, C# and/or Java programming language and Linux OS – especially syscalls and Linux Audit Framework. Familiarity with MS Windows auditing framework would be a plus. Good time-management and strong writing skills. We would use git and latex to write up the results; prior experience of these tools would be helpful but not required. Even if you do not have the right skills as listed above but you consider yourself dedicated, passionate, hardworking and willing to learn new skills, we would like to hear from you.

It is intended that once the implementation is working it can be used for practical trials, and we would anticipate a potential conference paper may be submitted for publication based on the implementation and subsequent trials; the respective student would be a co-author of this paper.

As part of the project, you will work with an experienced and dedicate team of researchers who encourage innovative thinking and students taking ownership. You will be given necessary support throughout the project period with regular meetings, blackboard sessions and guidance on how to carry out research effectively. This project is part of a much larger EPSRC funded project, so you would have an opportunity to work and contribute to a research project with real world significance and impact. In previous year’s projects, a student was co-inventor on the generated patent application from the respective UROP project and also a co-author on the related research paper.